About the US/LHC Project

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland is opening new vistas on the deepest secrets of the universe, stretching the imagination with newly discovered forms of matter, forces of nature, and dimensions of space. This site provides general information about the Large Hadron Collider and detailed information about American participation in the LHC accelerator and experiments. U.S. LHC participation is supported by the US Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment producing two high-energy photons (red towers). This is what we would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. (Courtesy: CERN)

The scientists and students in the Syracuse University group are involved with many aspects of the LHCb experiment. For example, one member works on detector and electronics configurations and software for the Vertex Locator, and tests of detector components. The Vertex Locator measures the tracks of charged particles emitted from the collision of protons accelerated by the LHC. The group also designed transport modules to move the Vertex Locator detector components safely from the UK to CERN.

Another member of the Syracuse group works to align the many different pieces of the LHCb detector, critical for correctly analyzing data collected from the detector.

The LHCb trigger is the hardware and software in the detector that quickly decides which collisions should be saved for further analysis. Because of computing constraints, none of the LHC experiments can record all the data that comes from the detector. LHCb keeps 2000 out of approximately 20 million events each second. One part of the Syracuse team creates software that monitors the LHCb trigger.

The group also designed a system to calibrate the sensors of the Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector. The purpose of this LHCb subsystem is to decide if a charged particle produced in a collision of two protons is a pion, kaon, proton or electron.